One of the coolest aspects of working as a manga editor is getting to know the creators you're working with. Often, you learn a lot about your artists and writers pretty early on--usually before their project has even been formally greenlit. However, even long after work has begun on their book, creators still have a way of surprising you.

Case in point. Today, I was adding a few more websites to my list of "favorite sites" (which, if you haven't noticed, are all TOKYOPOP creator websites). One of the websites I added is the Paper Films site, which is the business website of both Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray. Palmiotti and Gray, for those of you who don't know, are the critically acclaimed writers of such comic book series as Hawkman, Jonah Hex, and Daughters of the Dragon (the best Marvel series you're not reading). They're also the authors of Zeroes, an upcoming global manga series that I'm editing. Now, I don't know Jimmy and Justin as well as some of the other creators I'm working with (they're busy guys), but I thought I knew them well enough to know their backgrounds, and what sort of things they've done professionally outside of the work they're doing with TOKYOPOP.

However, as I'm looking through their website, I come across the following in Justin's bio section:

Justin has held various jobs including, fossil hunting, microphotography of 20 million year old insects and plants trapped in amber, seminars and exhibitions on the cleaning, mining and identification of said prehistoric insects for the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian. He traveled to the mountains of the Dominican Republic and mined amber.

Along with eccentric inventor Roy Larimer, Justin has delivered previously undiscovered species of insects to the curator of entomology at AMNH.

After being informed by the Houston Institute for Technology that it was impossible, he and his brother Collin helped Roy Larimer develop the first laser operated shadowbox, which was used to house meteorite fragments for the Philips Auction House in Manhattan.
In the summer of 1997, he traveled to the Wyoming badlands to help unearth the remains of a triceratops.

So apparently, I've been completely and shockingly blind to the fact that I'm working with Indiana Jones. Maybe it was his lack of fedora. Good thing I didn't try to argue science with him.

I'd suggest to Justin that our next project after Zeroes should deal with dinosaurs and mined amber, but I think Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg already beat us to the punch. Still, maybe it's not too late to add some killer bugs to Zeroes...